It has been said of
the Holy Roman Empire that it was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire.
Something similar could be said of "scientific creationism" or "Bible science."
It is neither good science nor good Bible, but a confusion of both. Creationism
attempts to do a biblical reading of scientific and historical data and a
scientific and historical reading of biblical data. Neither of these crossovers
is appropriate or workable. They are true neither to science nor to the Bible,
even though they claim to offer the only true science and true biblical
teaching. The result is a labyrinthian tangle that requires considerable energy
and patience to unravel.

To suggest that the first chapters of Genesis
ought to be viewed as an alternative to evolutionary theories presupposes that
these chapters are yielding something comparable to scientific theories and
historical reconstructions of empirical data. Interpreting the Genesis accounts
faithfully, and believing in their reliability and authority, is presumed to
mean taking them literally as history, as chronology, as scientific truth. The
Creation Research Society requires its membership to sign a statement of belief
which begins:

The Bible is the written Word of God, and because we believe
it to be inspired thruout [sic], all of its assertions are scientifically
true in all of the original autographs. To the student of nature, this
means that the account of origins in Genesis is a factual presentation of
simple historical truths. (Creation Research Society
Quarterly)

When one carefully examines the argument, however, one
discovers that the biblical understanding of creation is not being pitted
against evolutionary theories, as is supposed. Rather, evolutionary theories are
being juxtaposed with literalist theories of biblical interpretation. This is
not even like comparing

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oranges and apples; it is more like trying to compare oranges
and orangutans.

Even if evolution is only a scientific theory of interpretation
posing as scientific fact, as the creationists argue, creationism is only a
religious theory of biblical interpretation posing as biblical fact. And to
compound the confusions, these biblical "facts" are then treated as belonging to
the same level of discourse and family of concerns as scientific facts and
therefore supportable by scientific data, properly
interpreted.

Quasi-Science and Quasi-Religion

Most analysts
outside the movement would readily concur that Creation Science is not genuine
science but a deceptive facsimile which easily misleads people who have only a
lay knowledge of science. It is not a science inasmuch as the organization of
data and the conclusions are already present from the start, and are absolute
and inviolable. No contrary arguments or information can be entertained or
admitted, on the grounds that the scientific and historical truth of the matter
has already been vouchsafed by divine revelation. There is therefore no
possibility for free and unfettered inquiry, moving wherever the evidence seems
to lead no matter how many cherished beliefs and time-hallowed opinions may have
to be modified or abandoned.

A leading creationist, Henry Morris, states:
"It is only in the Bible that we can possibly obtain any information about the
methods of creation, the order of creation, the duration of creation, or any of
the other details of creation" (Morris, p. 16). What scientific investigation
there is, under these dogmatic assumptions, is devoted to finding evidence to
fit this "creation model," and to discrediting all evidence that does not
corroborate it. In the event that this is not sufficiently persuasive,
name-calling, innuendo, and guilt-by-association are resorted to:

Belief
in evolution is a necessary component of atheism, pantheism, and all other
systems that reject the sovereign authority of an omnipotent personal God.
[It] has historically been used by their leaders to justify a long succession of
evil systems—including fascism, communism, anarchism, Nazism, occultism,
and many others. [It] leads normally to selfishness, aggressiveness, and
fighting between groups, as well as animalistic attitudes and behavior by
individuals (Morris, p. vii).

Such so-called science is not scientific
either in spirit or in form. Its presuppositions, motives, methods, attitudes,
reasonings, and results are a gross caricature of science. Preston Cloud has
noted: "Fundamentalist creationism is not a science but a form of antiscience,
whose more vocal practitioners, despite their master's and doctoral degrees in
the sciences, play fast and loose with the facts of geology and biology" (p.
15).

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While such distortions of science and their effects on public
education are in need of careful scrutiny, the other side of creation science is
equally a caricature, namely its claim to represent the true understanding of
the biblical texts of creation and their theological meaning. Of the two
distortions, the religious misrepresentation is at least as critical as the
scientific, if not more so. In a sense, it is more critical inasmuch as
the motivations for creationism are basically religious, not scientific. The
problem has arisen, in the first place, because of certain fundamental
misunderstandings of the biblical texts, which then lead to distortions of
science in an effort to bring it into conformity with the literalist belief
system. Only when the religious misunderstandings are clarified is there a
possibility of resolving the problem.

Despite the efforts of some
creationists to soft-pedal the religious character of the "creationist model" in
order to get their textbooks adopted and their position given "equal time" in
public education, such a subterfuge hardly veils the religious character of the
position. How can one have a Creation without a Creator? If creationism is
fundamentally a religious position rather than a scientific one, it must finally
be examined and critiqued on religious grounds. No matter how many creationist
arguments are shown to be fallacious, and no matter how much evolutionary data
is marshaled against the position, inasmuch as the ultimate commitment is to a
particular interpretation of religious texts, scientific evidence can never be
fully convincing. So long as the literalist theory of interpreting Genesis
materials remains the cornerstone of creationism, no amount of scientific
information, however otherwise overwhelming, will be permitted to cast doubt on
the literalist credo.

Creationist attempts at refuting mounting evidence
from many scientific fields in support of evolutionary theory and at marshalling
their own evidence in support of creationism are reminiscent of tobacco company
scientists arguing that no direct correlation between smoking and lung cancer
have been decisively proven. One suspects that motives other than a quest for
truth and impartiality are involved. In this case the motives are undoubtedly
religious, even if, as will be shown, mistakenly and misguidedly so. When
someone is determined enough to defend a particular position against all comers,
however tenuous it might be, the impossibility of absolute scientific proof
always leaves the door open a crack for various and sundry positions to slip in
and out. Exceptionally determined people, it seems, like the Queen in Alice
in Wonderland, are capable of believing as many as three impossible things
before breakfast!

Approaching the Biblical Texts

The Biblical
record, accepted in its natural and literal sense, gives the
only

Quite apart from any scientific and historical objections that
may be advanced against such a statement, there is not a single word of truth in
it, biblically or theologically. As long as creationism maintains an ultimate
allegiance to such an interpretive approach to biblical materials and religious
doctrines, every effort will be made to shift doubt away from its own
assumptions—where doubt properly belongs—and onto evolutionary science. The
creationist tactic is two-fold: to equate doubts about literalism with doubts
about the Bible and its religious teachings; and to divert all doubt in the
direction of scientific assumptions, scientific evidence, the scientific method,
scientific motives, scientific conclusions, the presumed consequences of
science, and scientists themselves.

But these literalist assumptions are
precisely what are in question. It is by no means self-evident that the biblical
texts upon which creationism bases its case are a "record," or that they give
"every appearance of straightforward historical narrative," or that their
"natural" sense is the "literal sense," or that this sense is "scientific" or
"matter-of-fact." Nor is it self-evident that the Genesis authors are attempting
to provide "information," and that this supposed information is "about the
methods of creation, the order of creation, the duration of creation, or any of
the other details of creation." Quite the contrary. These are assumptions—indeed
demands—that have been brought to the text, confused with the text, given the
authority of the text, and absolutized along with the text, requiring the same
allegiance as to the text itself. Such an absolutizing of assumptions is neither
in the spirit of science nor the Bible. In science it is called dogmatism; in
the Bible, idolatry.

This may be the way the creation texts appear to certain modern interpreters at considerable remove from the religious
context in which the texts were written and imbued with a consciousness so
heavily influenced by science and historiography. And this may be the way these
texts have always appeared to an unreflective popular level of religion. But it
is by no means obvious that this represents the original intent, religious
concern, or literary form of the Genesis materials. This is the fundamental
interpretive issue. And it cannot be settled by dogmatic assertions about the
Bible nor by scientific and historical evidence concerning the natural order but
only by careful examination of the texts themselves and the contexts in which,
and to which, they were written.

When this is done, the Genesis accounts
of creation do not prove to be in conflict with scientific or historical
knowledge. This is not because the creation texts can be shown to be in
conformity with the latest scientific and historical knowledge, or supported by
it, but precisely because they have

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little to do with it. They belong to
radically different types of literature, with equally different types of
concerns and goals.

Let's take an example from poetry, with which Genesis
has more affinities than with scientific or historical prose. A poetic treatment
of an autumn sunset is neither scientifically true nor untrue. It needs no
harmonization with scientific statements and requires no scientific
confirmation. It is simply unrelated to that sort of truth and that type of
concern. A poem deals with poetic truth and poetic concerns. For someone to try
to defend a particular poem by attempting to argue that it was scientifically
and historically correct in every respect would be no defense at all. It would
be a confusion of categories, like trying to defend a client being sued for
divorce in a traffic court. In literature this would be called a mixing of
genres. Any defense of a poem based on such confusions, and any attack on other
forms of literature which do not "agree" with the poem, no matter how
well-meaning and heroic, would be the greatest possible disservice to the poem,
the spirit of the words, the intentions of the poet, and the nature of
poetry.

Similarly, a literal interpretation of the Genesis accounts of
creation is inappropriate, misleading, and unworkable. It presupposes a kind of
literature and concern that is not there. In doing so it misses the symbolic
richness of what is there and subjects the biblical materials, and the theology
of creation, to a completely pointless and futile controversy. The "creation
model" of origins is not what the texts are about. So the issue, ultimately, is
not that creationism is scientifically and historically incorrect, but
biblically incorrect.

Monotheism Versus Polytheism

There are
actually two accounts of creation, one following the other, in Genesis 1 and 2.
The first is commonly referred to as the Priestly account, because it reflects a
priestly style, and priestly context and concern. It was probably written in the
sixth century B.C. during, or shortly after, the Babylonian captivity. The
Priestly account uses the schema of six days of creation and occupies the first
chapter and first verses of the second. The other account, to which this has
been prefaced, begins in chapter two, verse 4b, and contains the story of Adam
and Eve in Eden. It is referred to as the Yahwist account because of its use of
the term Yahweh (Jehovah) for God, and was probably written in the time
of Solomon (tenth century B.C.). Since it is the Priestly account that is
central to the "creation model," the preponderance of attention will be given to
the problem of its interpretation.

The alternative to the Priestly account
available at the time was obviously not some prominent theory of evolution. All
cultures surrounding Israel had their origin myths, some impressively developed
in epic proportions and

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covering most every aspect of the cosmos in great
detail. Yet they were, from the standpoint of Jewish monotheism, hopelessly
polytheistic. The one origin account within Israel, the Yahwist, was
monotheistic. But it did not have the sweeping cosmic scope of other
cosmologies. This was especially critical relative to Canaanite religion within
Palestine, with its Baal myth and cult, and to the religion of the Assyrians and
Babylonians who in succession had conquered Israel and were the proud possessors
of grand cosmologies, as well as complex astrological systems.

In fact, if
one looks at the cosmological alternatives that were prominent in the ancient
world, one senses immediately that the current debate over creation and
evolution would have seemed very strange, if not unintelligible, to the writers
and readers of Genesis. Scientific and historical issues in their modern secular
form were not issues in debate at all. Science and natural history as we know
them simply did not exist, even though they owe a debt to the positive value
given to the natural order by the biblical monotheistic affirmation of creation,
which emptied nature of its many resident divinities.

What very much
existed and what pressed on Jewish faith from all sides—and even from
within—were the religious problems of idolatry and syncretism. The critical
question in the creation account of Genesis 1 was polytheism versus monotheism.
That was the burning issue of the day, not some issue which certain Americans
2,500 years later in the midst of a scientific age might imagine that it was.
And one of the reasons for its being such a burning issue was that Jewish
monotheism was such a unique and hard-won faith. The temptations of idolatry and
syncretism were everywhere. Every nation surrounding Israel, both great and
small, was polytheistic. And many Jews themselves held—as they always had
held—similar inclinations. Hence the frequent prophetic diatribes against altars
in high places, the Canaanite cult of Baal, and "whoring after other
gods."

Read through the eyes of the people who wrote it, Genesis 1 would
seem very different from the way most people today would tend to read
it—including both evolutionists who may dismiss it as a prescientific account of
origins and creationists who may try to defend it as the true science and
literal history of origins. For most peoples in the ancient world the various
regions of nature were divine. Sun, moon, and stars were gods. There were
sky gods, earth gods, and water gods. There were gods of light and darkness,
rivers and vegetation, animals and fertility. Everywhere the ancients turned
there were divinities to be taken into account, petitioned, appeased, pacified,
solicited, avoided. For ancient Jewish faith, this divinized nature posed a
fundamental religious problem

In addition, pharaohs, kings, and heroes
were often seen as sons of gods, or at least as special mediators between the
divine and human spheres. The greatness and vaunted power and glory of the
successive waves of empires that impinged on or conquered Israel (Egypt,
Assyria, Babylon, Persia) posed an analogous problem of idolatry in the human
sphere.

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In the light of this historical context it becomes clearer what
Genesis 1 is undertaking and accomplishing: a radical and sweeping affirmation
of monotheism vis-a-vis polytheism, syncretism, and idolatry. Each day of
creation tackles two principal categories of divinity in the pantheons of the
day and declares that these are not gods at all, but creations of the one true
God who is the only one, without a second or third. Each day dismisses an
additional cluster of deities, arranged in a cosmological and symmetrical
order.

On the first day the gods of light and darkness are dismissed. On
the second day, the gods of sky and sea. On the third day, earth gods and gods
of vegetation. On the fourth day, sun, moon, and star gods. The fifth and sixth
days take away any associations with divinity from the animal kingdom. And
finally human existence, too, is emptied of any intrinsic divinity—while at the
same time all human beings, from the greatest to the least (not just
pharaohs, kings, and heroes) are granted a divine likeness and
mediation.

On each day of creation another set of idols is smashed. These,
O Israel, are no gods at all—even the great gods and rulers of conquering
superpowers. They are the creations of that transcendent One who is not to be
confused with any piece of the furniture of the universe of creaturely
habitation. The creation is good, it is very good, but it is not
divine.

We are then given a further clue concerning the polemical design
of the passage when the final verse (2:4a) concludes: "These are the generations
of the heavens and the earth when they were created." Why the word
generations, especially if what is being offered is a chronology of days
of creation? Now to polytheist and monotheist alike the word generations
at this point would immediately call one thing to mind. If we should ask how
these various divinities were related to one another in the pantheons of the
day, the most common answer would be that they were related as members of a
family tree. We would be given a genealogy, as in Hesiod's Theogony,
where the great tangle of Greek gods and goddesses were sorted out by
generations. Ouranos begat Kronos; Kronos begat Zeus.

The Egyptians,
Assyrians, and Babylonians all had their "generations of the gods." Thus the
Priestly account, which had begun with the majestic words, "In the beginning God
created the heavens and the earth," now concludes—over against all the
impressive and colorful pantheons with their divine pedigrees "These are the
generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created." It was
a final pun on the concept of the divine family tree.

Other cosmologies
operated, essentially, on an analogy with procreation. A cosmic egg is
produced and hatches. A cosmic womb gives birth. Or a god and goddess mate and
beget further gods and goddesses. In the priestly account a radical shift has
taken place from the imagery of procreation to that of creation, from a genealogy of the gods to a genesis of nature.

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When Hesiod entitled
his monumental effort at systematizing the complicated web of relationships
between the many Greek gods and goddesses a theogony, he was reflecting
the fundamental character of such cosmologies. They are theogonies (birth of the
gods) and theo-biographies as well. They depict the origin, life, and times of
the various divinities. And they interpret "nature" in terms of these divine
relationships. Procreative, family, social, and political relationships are used
to describe the natural order, understood as divine beings and powers. Thus, if
there is any sense in which the "creation model" of Genesis stands over against
evolutionary models of natural and human history, it is in the sense that it
self-consciously and decisively rejects any evolution of cosmic forces presented
in terms of an evolution of the gods. For that, by and large, was what
polytheistic cosmologies were: the evolution of natural phenomena read as the
emergence of new species of divinity. And their interaction with one another,
their ecology, was read as the interaction within and between various families,
clans, and armies of gods.

The fundamental question at stake, then, could
not have been the scientific question of how things achieved their present form
and by what processes nor even the historical question about time periods and
chronological order.

The issue was idolatry, not science; syncretism, not
natural history; theology, not chronology; affirmation of faith in one
transcendent God, not empirical or speculative theories of origin. Attempting to
be loyal to the Bible by turning the creation accounts into a kind of science or
history is like trying to be loyal to the teachings of Jesus by arguing that his
parables are actual historical events and only reliable and trustworthy when
taken literally as such.

Even among interpreters who do not identify with
the literalism of the creationists, one often finds a sense of relief expressed
in noting that the sequence of days in Genesis 1 is relatively "modern," and
offers a rough approximation to contemporary reconstructions of the evolution of
matter and life. Actually, however, its closest approximation in this regard is
to the Babylonian "Genesis," the Enuma elish. This epic mythology exalts
Marduk, the patron deity of Babylon, as the supreme divinity in the Mesopotamian
pantheon. Marduk is extolled for rescuing the cosmos from the threat of the
goddess of the watery abyss, Tiamat, out of whose womb the first gods had come.
He then established, out of the two halves of the slain Tiamat, heaven and
earth; sun, moon, and stars; vegetation; animals and fish; human beings. It is
this order, and this cosmology, that Genesis 1 most directly approximates. It
provides a Jewish cosmology to preface the story of Adam and Eve, on a scale
equally encompassing to that of other ancient Near Eastern cosmologies, yet
without the polytheistic mythological dramatics.

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The attempt, then, to
harmonize Genesis with modern science by reading the days of creation as
referring to large epochs of time, rather than literal days, is no more
relevant to the issues the Priestly writer was addressing than the literalist
interpretation. At best the days, read as epochs, provide a very rough
approximation to recent scientific scenarios. The entire progression actually
begins, not with a burst of light, but with watery chaos—as in the Babylonian
epic—which hardly corresponds to any modern understanding of origins. The
"formless earth" is also depicted as existing before the light of day one and
the sun, moon, and stars of day four. Vegetation is created before the sun,
moon, and stars, on the third day, and surely would have wilted awaiting the
next epoch.

Still, no matter how close the approximations to modem natural
histories might be, the entire line of argument is a lapse into a form of
literalism, with its assumption that this account is in some way comparable to a
scientific, historical one. If there is a "modern" appearance to the account, it
is not because it anticipates modem scientific constructions by presenting a
similar sketch of a scientific order but because it anticipates them by
preparing the way for them, in purging the cosmic order of all gods and
goddesses. In Genesis the natural order, for the first time, becomes natural
rather than supernatural. Nature has been demythologized and de-divinized. What
was formerly divine, or a divine region, is now declared to be "creature."
Nature, in fact, could not become nature in the sense in which we have come to
use the term until it was emptied of divinity by monotheistic faith. Nor could
science and natural history become possibilities until nature was thoroughly
demythologized. One may have half-way houses, such as astrology and alchemy, but
only when nature is no longer a divine sphere can it be probed and studied and
organized without fear of trespass or reprisal.

This does not mean that
Genesis secularizes or desacrilizes nature; nature is still sacred by virtue of
having been created by God, declared to be good, and placed under ultimate
divine sovereignty. What it does mean is that Genesis 1 clears the cosmic
stage of its mythical scenes and polytheistic dramas, making way for different
scenes and dramas, both monotheistic and naturalistic.

Numbering and
Numerology

A related area of confusion is the supposition that the
numbering of days is to be understood in an arithmetical sense, whether as
literal days or as epochs. This is certainly the way in which numbers are used
in science, history, and mathematics—indeed, in almost all areas of modern life.
But the use of numbers in ancient religious texts was often numerological rather
than numerical. That is, their symbolic value, not their secular value as
counters, was the basis and purpose for their use.

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The conversion of numerology
to arithmetic was essential for the rise of modern science,
historiography, and mathematics. Numbers had to be neutralized, secularized, and
completely stripped of any symbolic suggestion in order to be utilized. The
principal surviving exception to this is the negative symbolism attached to the
number 13, which still holds a strange power over Fridays, and over the listing
of floors in hotels and high rises.

The creationists, in their literal
treatment of the six days of creation, are substituting a modern, arithmetical
reading for the original symbolic one. They are therefore offering, unwittingly,
a secular rather than religious interpretation. And in the process, they lose
the symbolic associations and meanings of the text while needlessly placing it
in conflict with scientific and historical readings of origins.

One of the
religious considerations involved in numbering is to make certain that any
schema used works out numerologically—that it uses, and adds up to, the right
numbers symbolically. An obvious concern of the Priestly account is to correlate
the theme of the divine work in creation with the six days of work and seventh
day of rest in the Jewish week. If the Hebrews had had a five-day or seven-day
work week, the account would have read differently. Seven was a basic unit of
time among West Semitic peoples, and the Sabbath-day was well defined and
established by this period. It was important, then, to use a schema of seven
days, and to have the work of creation completed on the sixth day. "And God
ceased on the seventh day from all the work which he had done" (Genesis 2:2).
The word "ceases" is shabat, a cognate of the term shabbat,
sabbath. The "creation model" being used here is in no sense a scientific
model, but a liturgical-calendrical model based on the Jewish week and
observance of sabbath. Its motivation is religious, not scientific: to give
ultimate grounding to the meaning of human work and creation, and to the
religious significance of the sabbath observance.

The seven-day structure
is also being used for another, not unrelated, reason. The number 7 has the
numerological meaning of wholeness, plenitude, completeness. This symbolism is
derived, in part, from the combination of the three major zones of the cosmos as
seen vertically (heaven, earth, underworld) and the four quarters and
directions of the cosmos as seen horizontally. Both the numbers 3 and 4
in themselves often function as symbols of totality, for these and other
reasons. But what would be more "total" would be to combine the vertical and
horizontal planes. Thus the number 7 (adding 3 and 4) and the number 12
(multiplying them) are recurrent biblical symbols of fullness and perfection: 7
golden candlesticks, 7 spirits, 7 words of praise, 7 churches, the 7th year, the
49th year, the 70 elders, forgiveness 70 times 7, and so forth.

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When
Joshua's army took the city of Jericho, they are said to
have circumambulated the walls once a day for the first 6 days, and 7
times on the 7th day, preceded by 7 priests blowing 7 trumpets; whereupon the
walls collapsed and the city was completely taken. Even Leviathan, the dread
dragon of the abyss, was represented in Canaanite myth as having 7 heads—the
"complete" monster.

The symbolic meaning of the number 7, and of the 7
days, also harks back to the lunar calendar which, in Mesopotamia, had quite
early been divided into 4 phases of the moon, of 7 days each, followed
(beginning with the 28th day) by the 3-day disappearance of the moon—thus
equally 30 days. The Babylonian epic of creation, Enuma elish—which
itself consists of 7 tablets—has the god Marduk appointing the moon to four
7-day periods: "Thou shalt have luminous horns to signify six days, on the
seventh day reaching a half-crown" (Pritchard, p. 68). On the seventh day of
these lunar weeks one was counseled to abstain from a variety of ordinary
activities because of the dangers involved during the critical transitions of
the lunar progression. According to one ritual text, seers were not to give
oracles, physicians to administer to the sick, or the king to change clothing,
ride in a chariot, hold court, eat cooked meat, or offer sacrifices (Barton, p.
258 f.). The day of the full moon was known as shapattu, which has a
probable relation to the Hebrew term for sabbath, shabbat, and shabat,
"stop working." This day is referred to in the Mesopotamian cuneiform texts
as the "day of the quieting of the heart."

In the Hebrew tradition the
seventh day, while associated with cessation of normal activity, is separated
from the lunar week and looked upon more positively as a day of blessing,
celebration, and rest. "The Lord blessed the sabbath day and hallowed it"
(Exodus 20:11). This day does not suggest an atmosphere of anxiety or
transition, but of relaxation and completion. Such positive meanings are now
being applied by the author of Genesis 1 to a celebration of the whole of
creation and of the parenthesis of sabbath rest. The liturgically repeated
phrase "And God saw that it was good," which appears after each day of creation,
and the final capping phrase "And behold it was very good," are paralleled and
underlined by being placed in a structure that is climaxed by a seventh
day.

The Priestly account also makes use of the symbolism of the
corresponding number for wholeness and totality: 12. The six days of creation
are actually two sets of three days each, with two types of phenomena assigned
to each day. The second set of days fills in the details provided by the
backdrop of the first set of days. The light and darkness of day one are
populated by the greater and lesser lights of day four; the firmament and waters
of day two are populated by the birds and fish of day five; and the earth and
vegetation of day three are populated by the land animals and humans of day six.
In this manner all the major regions of the cosmos are covered in six days,
with two zones included each day, equalling 12. Thus the symbolism of
completion and fulfillment is associated with the work of creation as
well as the rest from it on the seventh day. The totality of nature is created
by God, is good, and is to be celebrated both daily and in special acts of
worship and praise on the sabbath day.

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Uses of the numerology of 12, like
7, abound throughout the Bible: the 12 tribes of Israel, as well as the 12
tribes of Ishmael, the 12 districts of Solomon, and Jesus' selection of 12
disciples, along with a miscellany of references to 12 pillars, 12 springs, 12
precious stones, 12 gates, 12 fruits, 12 pearls, and so forth. We, of course,
continue the biblical and ancient Near Eastern division of the day and night
into 12 hours and the year into 12 months. And the grouping of stars into 12
constellations and signs of the zodiac into 12 periods also derives from ancient
Mesopotamia, along with the belief that the body was composed of 12 parts or
regions.

Though in the modern world numbers have become almost completely
secularized, in antiquity they could function as significant vehicles of meaning
and power. It was important to associate the right numbers with one's life and
activity and to avoid the wrong numbers. To do so was to surround and fill one's
existence with the positive meanings and powers which numbers such as 3, 4, 7
and 12 conveyed. In this way one gave religious significance to life and placed
one's existence in harmony with the divine order of the cosmos. By aligning and
synchronizing the microcosm of one's individual and family life and the mesocosm
of one's society and state with the macrocosm itself, life was tuned to the
larger rhythms of this sacred order.

For us the overriding consideration
in the use of numbers is their secular value in arithmetic. We must therefore
have numbers that are completely devoid of all symbolic associations. Numbers
such as 7 and 12 do not make our calculators or computers function any better,
nor does the number 13 make them any less efficient. Our numbers are uniform,
value-neutral-meaningless and powerless. What is critical to modern
consciousness is having the right numbers in the sense of having the right
figures and right count. This sense, of course, was also present in the ancient
world: in commerce, in construction, in military affairs, in taxation. But there
was also a higher, symbolic use of numbers. And in a religious context, it was
more important to have the right numbers in a sacred rather than profane sense.
While we give the highest value, and nearly exclusive value, to numbers as
carriers of "facts," in religious texts and rituals the highest value was given
to numbers as carriers of ultimate truth and reality.

- page 13 -

Those, therefore,
who would attempt to impose a literal reading of numbers upon Genesis, as if the
sequence of days were of the same order as counting sheep or merchandise or
money, are offering a modern, secular interpretation of a sacred text—in the
name of religion. And, as if this were not distortion enough, they proceed
to place this secular reading of origins in competition with other secular
readings and secular literatures: scientific, historical, mathematical,
technological. Extended footnotes are appended to the biblical texts on such
extraneous subjects as the second law of thermodynamics, radiometric dating,
paleontology, sedimentation, hydrology, and so forth. These are hardly the
issues with which Genesis is concerning itself, or is exercised over.

The
Impossibility of Literalism

The attempt to do a literal reading of Genesis
cannot, in fact, be consistently pursued. And it is not, in actual practice.
Creationists are literalists up to a point, but when their particular line of
interpretation runs into an insurmountable difficulty they take that particular
item "metaphorically," or concoct some fanciful explanation which is far more
symbolic than the interpretation they are attempting to avoid. The rule of thumb
seems to be to take everything as literally as possible: give in only as a last
resort. Thus the assumption is that religious truth equals literal meaning, when
in most contexts the opposite is the case: religious truth equals symbolic
meaning. The first questions in interpreting the text are never clearly asked:
What kind of literature and linguistic usage is involved, what did the author
intend, and what issues are being addressed?

In the case of the Priestly
account, a literal reading is, at several critical points, impossible,
contradictory, or simply unwanted. For instance, the imagery of days is used in the main body of the text, but the account concludes with the very
different imagery of generations. The same word is used again in Genesis
5:1 to apply to the genealogy of Adam, and these generations are calculated as
being in the neighborhood of 100 years per generation—obviously not the
equivalent of single days. Clearly both the term days and the term
generations cannot be taken literally.

If one moves on to the
Yahwist account in Genesis 2:4b-25, the literalist encounters greater problems.
If the two creation accounts are interpreted chronologically, they hardly agree
in details or sequences. In Genesis 1 the order given is vegetation (day three);
sun, moon, and stars (day four); birds and fish (day five); land animals (first
half of day six). In Genesis 2 the order is quite different. Sun, moon, and
stars are already presupposed, and therefore are before vegetation rather than
after: "when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field
had yet sprung up . . . then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground"
(2:5-7). Adam is created also before any of the animals, rather than after as in
Genesis 1. Eve, on the other hand, is created after vegetation and animals, not
at the same time as Adam, as in Genesis 1. One would think that these
glaring differences would be a sufficient indication that literal historical
sequences could not be the original concern or intent.

- page 14 -

The treatment of
water in the two accounts is also quite different. Genesis 1 begins with watery
chaos, and with the problem of separating this water into the waters above and
the waters below (day two), as well as the problem of separating the earth from
the engulfing waters (day three). In other words, the setting of Genesis 1 is
one in which there is so much water that "the dry land" must be made to "appear"
(1:9). Genesis 2, however, begins with the opposite problem: no water at all.
The order is therefore quite the reverse of Genesis 1: first there is dry land,
then water is introduced. Rather than formless earth needing to be separated
from the embrace of the waters, the barren earth needs water in order for
vegetation to appear: "for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the
earth, and there was no man to till the ground; but a mist went up from the
earth and watered the whole face of the ground" (2:5, 6).

The differences
between these two ways of organizing the issue of origins is the result of two
contrasting life-settings in the history of Israel, the agricultural-urban and
the pastoral-nomadic. Genesis 1 has drawn upon the imagery of the great
civilizations inhabiting the river basins and areas adjacent to the sea, while
Genesis 2 has drawn upon an imagery more in accord with the experience of
wandering shepherds and goatherds living on the semiarid fringes of the fertile
plains. There is precedent in the history of Jewish experience for both. For the
shepherd nomad in search of green pastures, and moving between scattered
springs, wells, and oases, the primary problem in life (and therefore in
creation) is the absence of water. Water must be diligently sought out
and is a scarce and precious commodity. What is in abundance is dust, sand, and
wilderness rock. Thus the Yahwist begins quite naturally with a barren earth
onto which water must be introduced. If there is an equivalent to the imagery of
an initial chaos, it is not a watery chaos but a desert chaos.

The
literalist, attempting to synchronize these two accounts with each other, and
then with modern science and natural history, faces an impossible task. This is
further substantiated by observing the inability of a literal approach to handle
the puzzling imagery with which Genesis 1 begins. "The earth was without form
and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was
moving over the face of the waters" (1:2 RSV). If one tries to take a literal
interpretation, one immediately encounters the curious difficulty that none of
the three realities mentioned in this introductory verse is referred to as
created by God, either here or in the subsequent days of creation. On the first
day darkness is presupposed, while it is light that is created and
separated from the darkness. On the second day

- page 15 -

water (the deep)
is presupposed, while the firmament is created, separating the water into the
waters above and the waters below. And on the third day the formless earth is
presupposed, being separated from the waters "under the heavens" which are
"gathered together into one place, letting the "dry land
appear."

This being the case, if one is determined to take the
account literally, one achieves a very awkward and unwanted result: God created
everything but darkness, water and earth, which are therefore co-eternal with
God. It is also totally contrary to all scientific evidence, whether geological
or astronomical, that either water or earth existed before light (day one), sky
(day two), or sun, moon, and stars (day four). Darkness perhaps, but not water
and earth.

These difficulties can only be resolved by a different
interpretative approach which clarifies the literary form of the account, the
reasons for selecting this particular form, and the reasons for developing the
content of the passage in this particular order and manner. The basic literary
genre of Genesis 1 is cosmological. And, inasmuch as it is dealing
specifically with origins, it is cosmogonic. In order to interpret its
meaning one has to learn to think cosmogonically, not scientifically or
historically. This does not mean that the materials are, in any sense,
irrational or illogical. They are perfectly rational and orderly, and have a
logic all their own. But that logic is not biological or geological or
paleontological or even chronological. It is cosmological and
theological.

The Cosmogonic Form

Cosmogony is a common
literary form in the ancient world, though the monotheistic content of Genesis 1
is certainly different from the highly mythological, polytheistic content of
other cosmogonies. There was an established cosmogonic vocabulary with which the
Priestly author could work. The motif of a primordial chaos, characterized by a
combination of "chaotic" features, such as watery deep, darkness, formlessness,
boundlessness, is a familiar theme in ancient Near Eastern cosmogonies. In
Egyptian myth this original reality is described in terms of four primordial
pairs of divinities, representing the qualities of this relatively
undifferentiated cosmic brew. Nun and Naunet are the Primeval waters; Kuk and
Kauket are the primeval darkness; Huh and Hauhet are the boundless primeval
formlessness; and Amun and Amanunet are the obscurity and indefinability of this
mysterious source of that which now has clear definition and place. Out of this
beginning rises the primeval hill, like a muddy, fertile hillock from the
receding waters of the Nile. Subsequently come the appearances and separations
of the sun (Atum), air and moisture (Shu and Tefnut), sky and earth (Nut and
Geb), and so forth. The logic of the

- page 16 -

cosmogony is that, if things now
form an ordered cosmos, with each sphere clearly demarcated, there must first
have been a time when they came to be what they now are out of an initial state
in which this situation did not obtain—that is, chaos. And water is a natural
candidate for depicting this formless beginning.

Sumerian cosmogony,
similarly, began with the primeval sea (Nammu) which gave birth to the cosmic
mountain, with earth (Ki) as its base and heaven (An) as its peak, Earth and
heaven then begat air (Enlil) who, like Shu in Egyptian myth, separates and
stands between them. Likewise the Babylonian Enuma elish depicts a
beginning in which there was only water. The primeval ocean, in this case, is
pictured as the confluence of the fresh lake and river waters of Apsu (male) and
the salt sea waters of Tiamat (female), whose commingling begets the gods. Or as
another, hymnlike version, found at Sippar, paradoxically phrased the beginning:
"All lands were sea; then there was a movement in the midst of the
sea."

Such aboriginal waters not only were seen as the source of life and
fertility, but as having the potential for taking back and destroying what they
have given. In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Atum warns of the
possibility that "the earth will return to the floodwaters, as in the
beginning." Because the Nile river is relatively placid and regular this theme
does not take on the dramatic proportions that it does elsewhere. In Canaan the
god of rainfall and fertility, Baal, subdues Yam, god of the sea, and defeats
Leviathan (the serpentine), also called Rahab (the ferocious). He thus gains
control of the weather and seasons, and brings about order. Similarly, the
Hittites to the north celebrated at the New Year the victory of the weather god
who had conquered the primeval waterdragon, thus placing rainfall under his
dominion and regulation.

In the Mesopotamian plains, with the greater
irregularity of flooding along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers—as instanced in
the extreme with the Great Flood accounts in Genesis 6-9 and the Babylonian Epic
of Gilgamesh, whose details are quite similar—this invasion of the waters is a
perennial threat. Sumerian myth recounts a sinister plot to inundate the plains,
which was subverted by the god Ninurta (or goddess Inanna) who channeled the
subterranean waters through the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates. Both Genesis
and the Gilgamesh epic, of course, recount a "sinister plot" that was
carried out. And much of the Babylonian epic of Enuma elish is taken
up with the conflict between the water goddess, Tiamat, and her progeny, as she
threatens to destroy the cosmos to which she had given birth.

When Genesis
1 calls upon similar images in describing the initial state of things, they are
well-known images found along a great cultural arc that runs from Egypt in the
south and Greece in the north through Palestine and Mesopotamia to India. And
they have a venerable antiquity—in several cases, an antiquity of one or
more millennia earlier than the Priestly account. While the imagery has
presented problems for a modern interpretation, it was, and had been for many
peoples for a long time, a perfectly natural way to begin a cosmogony.

- page 17 -

In
this cultural milieu which Genesis 1 broadly shares, the primary cosmological
problem to be addressed was the problem of water. Actually water presents a
double problem: its abundance and its formless ("chaotic") character. Water has
no shape of its own, and unchecked or uncontained, as in flood or storm, can
destroy that which has form. Similarly, the earth, engulfed by formless
(unformed) water is inevitably formless. Darkness, also, is dissolvent of form.
These problems, therefore, in the logic of the account, need to be confronted
first. The ambiguousness of water, darkness, and formless earth must be dealt
with in such a way as to restrain their negative potential and unleash their
positive potential.

The ensuing organization of materials is best
understood by seeing this initial verse as describing a three-fold problem
(the ambiguous potential of formless darkness, water, and earth) which is
then given a solution in the first three days of creation. The first day
of creation takes care of the problem of darkness through the creation of light.
The second day takes care of the problem of water through the creation of a
firmament to separate the water into the waters above (rain, snow, hail) and the
waters below (sea, rivers, subterranean streams). The third day takes care of
the problem of the formless earth by freeing earth from the waters and darkness
and assigning it to a middle region between light and darkness, sky (with its
waters), and underworld (with its waters). This then readies the cosmos for
populating these various realms in the next three days, like a house readied for
its inhabitants.

We thus observe a division of the account into three
movements (problem, preparation, population), each with three elements. The
problem of the three "chaotic" forces is resolved in the first three days of
creation by restraining their negative potential and unleashing their positive
potential. As a result a harmonious context is established in preparation for
the population of these three regions. The light and darkness of day one
are then populated by the sun, moon, and stars of day four. The sky and waters
of day two are populated by the birds and fish of day five. The earth and
vegetation of day three make possible a population by the land animals and human
beings of day six. The account should thus be read as if written in three
parallel columns (shown on page 18).

In this way of reading the account,
the dilemmas that arise for a literalist interpretation disappear. Three
problems, which are envisioned as difficulties for cosmicizing, are dealt with
first, followed by a sketch of the way in which these cosmic regions are then
inhabited. This is the logic of the account. It is not chronological,
scientific, or historical. It is cosmological.

- page 18 -

Problem

Preparation

Population

(vs. 2)

(days 1-3)

(days 4-6)

Darkness

la

Creation of light

4a

Creation of sun

b

Separation from darkness

b

Creation of moon, stars

Watery abyss

2a

Creation of firmament

5a

Creation of birds

b

Separation of waters above from waters below

b

Creation of fish

Formless earth

3a

Separation of earth from sea

6a

Creation of land animals

b

Creation of vegetation

b

Creation of humans

The procedure is not unlike that of a landscape painter, who first sketches in with broad
strokes the background of the painting: its regions of light and darkness, of
sky and water, and of earth and vegetation. Then within this context are painted
birds and fish, land animals, and human figures. It would be quite inappropriate
for anyone to try to defend, the artistic merit of the painting by attempting to
show that the order in which the painting was developed was scientifically and
historically "correct."

Myth, Legend, and History

The implication of
this d, ,, iscussion should not be taken to mean that everything in Genesis is
non-historical or without interest in history. Both the Priestly and Yahwist
accounts of creation are the beginning paragraphs of histories of Israel, which
had commenced with the origins of nature and humanity, moving through a kind of
universal history to the particular history of Israel. But using the word
history for all of these materials is misleading, if we mean by the term
a single, uniform concept of historical construction, such as modern historians
might attempt to achieve.

The interest of the Genesis authors was not
strictly and solely historical. In the first place they were concerned with
collecting and preserving the stories that were an ancient part of the Jewish
heritage, handed down largely by oral tradition. They were also concerned with
arranging these stories in their relative historical order, so there is a sense
of chronology and historical movement operative.

- page 19 -

In the Yahwist history, the
destruction of civilization in the flood, for example, is placed after rather
than before the story of Cain, the father of civilization. The Priestly
interest in genealogical lists and in dividing up materials into periods is
certainly sequential and systematic. And thirdly, the authors were concerned
with using these stories as instances of various theological and ethical truths.
The accounts are thus fundamentally theologies of history and moral
treatises.

Only the second of these concerns approximates a modern,
secular understanding of historical writing. And, of these three, it is not the
second but the first and third that are central to the purposes of the biblical
writings. Consequently, it is difficult to make a clear, unequivocal use of the
term history to apply to these materials, let alone terms such as
information, record, straightforward narrative, or factual, natural,
clear, definite, matter-of-fact. To try to apply such terms is misleading in
the extreme and greatly distorts the real character and intent. The literalist
view is not even a good representation of contemporary understandings of
historical writing and sounds rather like the objective ideal of newspaper
reporting. Again we have the problem of literary type. The biblical materials
are only partly similar to the type of literature which we might acknowledge in
our culture as being historical writing; there is certainly little similarity to
journalistic reporting, television newscasting, or courthouse
record-keeping.

Literalists are not the only ones to have done disservice
in this regard to the special genius of these ancient texts. Some liberal
interpreters, particularly of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century,
tended to agree with the literalists that the simple, literal meaning of these
stories was what the authors believed—that it reflected the childlike simplicity
of folk belief of the time, which post-enlightenment moderns, in their great
wisdom and sophistication, could no longer accept. Hermann Gunkel, for example,
in his influential Commentary on Genesis (1901), while defending the
poetic beauty and religious profundity of the Genesis sagas, as he called them,
nevertheless frequently spoke as if they were literally understood by those who
told them. The stories and their details are frequently referred to as
"primitive," "naive," "childish," "infantile," and "quite incredible." They are
seen to be offering explanations of a variety of phenomena that puzzled
the ancients, such as why snakes did not have legs like lizards, and thus as
representing the "humble beginnings" of science and history. For all these
matters we now have, of course, better explanations by virtue of the scientific
and historical rigor that eventually succeeded in emancipating itself from such
myth, saga, and legend.

- page 20 -

There are several misunderstandings in this way of
dealing with the biblical materials as well. The primary function of great myths
and legends is not that of offering explanations, as if intellectual curiosity
were the central issue. There may be miscellaneous stories, or parts of stories,
in which the etiological element is central. But the great stories are not
concerned with providing a miscellany of information or ready-made answers
for inquisitive children. They were understood as vehicles of the most basic and
important truths of all by which people organized, regulated, and interpreted
their lives, and through which they saw meaning, purpose, and value in their
existence. Myths and legends, together with rituals, provided the overarching
frame of reference within which to live and experience and celebrate the world.
As such they are not superseded by modem science or historiography, for they
belong to a different level of meaning and expression. Insofar as there is an
explanatory element in the stories, such as the origin of languages in a divine
judgment on building the Tower of Babel, this may be supplanted by later
understandings of linguistic development. But the central religious affirmations
can neither be supplanted nor supported by subsequent knowledge, any more than
Sophocles' Oedipus is replaced by Freud's Totem and Taboo or
Michaelangelo's Pieta by NASA's moonlander.

To be sure, there is a
child's level—generally unreflective level—in which the literal and symbolic,
explanation and interpretation, are not clearly distinguished. And it may be
that at some earlier time, or at the popular level of their own time, these
biblical stories were understood in a simplistic fashion. But this does not mean
that the Genesis authors themselves necessarily understood matters in this way.
They appear rather to be collecting and arranging and reworking ancient stories,
cosmological images, and the like, which are a familiar part of the Judaic
heritage, or familiar to the Judaic heritage. And they appear to be doing
this, not for the purpose of teaching these stories as such (in the modern sense
of teaching history or science), but in order to preserve them as an important
part of that heritage, to organize them, and to use them as familiar vehicles
for conveying theological, moral, and spiritual truths. The narrative form is
not the message; the religious content is the message.

But, in spite of
all this, there is indeed some historical value or basis in the Genesis stories.
The Garden of Eden, for example, contains a postulation, if not ancient
remembrance, of a food-gathering stage which preceded sheepherding (represented
by Abel and, later, Seth) and agriculture and urbanization (represented by
Cain). Eve's first eating of the fruit of knowledge, which led to agriculture
and eventually urbanization, may have some historical basis in the probable
origins of agriculture in simple plantings by women, and certainly in the
association of women with earth, water, fertility, and sedentary life. After he
is expelled from the food-gathering paradise, Cain becomes the first farmer and
first city-dweller; his name literally means "smith." He bears the mark on his
forehead used to set apart smiths, and among his descendants is Tubal-cain, "the
forger of all instruments of bronze and iron" (Gen. 4:22) (For extensive
discussion of this, and other mythological and cultural data which illuminate
Genesis 1-11, see Gaster, 1969). Cain's quarrel with Abel is certainly an
accurate historical reflection of the tension between nomadic pastoral peoples,
who lived on the perimeter of the fertile grassland and farmland of the plains,
and the sedentary agriculturalists—not unlike the conflicts of farmers with
cattleherds and shepherds in the American West of the nineteenth
century.

- page 21 -

Similarly, the flood story in Genesis 6-9 (and in the kindred
Epic of Gilgamesh) is based in the flood experiences of the Tigris and
Euphrates river valleys, and in particular in one great flood that inundated the
Mesopotamian plains before 3000 B.C.—which for the people of that region and
time would have been their "world." It is also quite plausible that some escaped
in boats and took animals with them. Sir Leonard Wooley's excavations around Ur
in 1929-30 uncovered a silt deposit eleven feet deep, with artifacts of human
habitation above and below, which he estimated would have been made by a flood
that covered the whole Mesopotamian region, as much as 30,000 square miles,
twenty-six feet deep—corresponding to the fifteen cubits depth mentioned in
Genesis (Daniel, pp. 39-47).

Still, to dwell on the historicity of the
accounts, even only an historical core, is to stray from the purposes of the
writings. They are not aimed at providing a "truer" picture of the universe or
of human history, let alone the only true picture, in the modem
scientific or historical senses of true. They are aiming rather at
providing a truer theological and moral picture of the universe, using
accessible and time-hallowed materials. One of the many ironies of creationism
is that, in its consuming passion to be faithful to its scriptures, it turns
attention away from the central religious concerns of the biblical authors and
focuses it on issues that are largely modern and secular. In so doing,
creationists are not nearly as conservative as they suppose. They are
modernistic and secularistic. And they have sold their religious birthright for
a mess of tangible pottage.

Dr. Hyers is professor of religion at Gustavus
Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota, and is the author of a recent book,
The Comic Vision and the Christian Faith. The present article is being
expanded into a book, The Meaning of Creation, which will be published
next summer by John Knox Press.
Copyright 1983 by Conrad Hyers